CAIRO — Her screams were not drowned out by the clamor of the crazed mob of nearly 200 men around her. An endless number of hands reached toward the woman in the red shirt in an assault scene that lasted less than 15 minutes but felt more like an hour.

She was pushed by the sea of men for about a block into a side street from Tahrir Square. Many of the men were trying to break up the frenzy, but it was impossible to tell who was helping and who was assaulting. Pushed against the wall, the unknown woman’s head finally disappeared. Her screams grew fainter, then stopped. Her slender tall frame had clearly given way. She apparently had passed out.

The helping hands finally splashed the attackers with bottles of water to chase them away.

The assault late Tuesday was witnessed by an Associated Press reporter who was almost overwhelmed by the crowd herself and had to be pulled to safety by men who ferried her out of the melee in an open Jeep.

Reports of assaults on women in Tahrir, the epicenter of the uprising that forced Hosni Mubarak to step down last year, have been on the rise with a new round of mass protests to denounce a mixed verdict against the ousted leader and his sons in a trial last week.

The late Tuesday assault was the last straw for many. Protesters and activists met Wednesday to organize a campaign to prevent sexual harassment in the square. They recognize it is part of a bigger social problem that has largely gone unpunished in Egypt. But the phenomenon is trampling on their dream of creating in Tahrir a micro-model of a state that respects civil liberties and civic responsibility, which they had hoped would emerge after Mubarak’s ouster.

‘It shouldn’t be happening’“Enough is enough,” said Abdel-Fatah Mahmoud, a 22-year-old engineering student, who met Wednesday with friends to organize patrols of the square in an effort to deter attacks against women. “It has gone overboard. No matter what is behind this, it is unacceptable. It shouldn’t be happening on our streets let alone Tahrir.”

No official numbers exist for attacks on women in the square because police do not go near the area, and women rarely report such incidents. But activists and protesters have reported a number of particularly violent assaults on women in the past week. Many suspect such assaults are organized by opponents of the protests to weaken the spirit of the protesters and drive people away.

Mahmoud said two of his female friends were cornered Monday and pushed into a small passageway by a group of men in the same area where the woman in the red shirt was assaulted. One was groped while the other was seriously assaulted, Mahmoud said, refusing to divulge specifics other than to insist she wasn’t raped.

Mona Seif, a well-known activist who has been trying to promote awareness about the problem, said Wednesday she was told about three different incidents in the past five days, including two that were violent. In one incident, the attackers ripped the woman’s clothes off and trampled on her companions, she said.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: You know, gentlemen, I’m a little bit jubilant right now, a little bit frisky so I’ll say something that will bother people. But if you have, a lot of the people in this country think the President of the United States is Muslim, which he’s not, he’s Christian. They think he’s foreign born, which he’s not, he’s American born. But they have this attitude about him, the people on the right a lot of them, right? And here he is, and he comes into office, and this jubilant situation in Eqypt, with the first time in our lives we get to see people from the Arab world in a very positive democratic setting. Not as terrorists or not as people fighting Israel, or whatever. Not mouthing epithets against the West, but people like us.

DAVID CORN, MOTHER JONES: Right, celebrating.

MATTHEWS: In a way it’s like it took Obama to have this happen, or it’s just so serendipitous.

“It took Obama to have this happen.” Praise him! Worship him! Our blessed messiah! Of course, a lot of people – like Israelis – were arguing from the outset that “this” actually wasn’t a good thing. At all. Conservatives like Sean Hannity predicted from the very outset that the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islamists were going to take control of Egypt – just as they did.

But who cares about reality? Praise Obama! Praise him! Worship him!

Is “serendipitous” a good adjective to describe rape? I’m sorry, I don’t have my liberal-to-English dictionary with me.

Mr. Obama downplayed concerns that the Muslim Brotherhood could take power and install a government hostile to U.S. interests.

“I think that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt. They don’t have majority support in Egypt but they are well organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti U.S., there is no doubt about it,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama said he wanted a representative government in Egypt that reflected the country’s broader civil society.

Though the current upheavals in the Middle East were not initiated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist parties in Egypt, as in Tunisia and Libya, have been the chief beneficiaries of the collapse of long-standing authoritarian repressive regimes across North Africa.

In Egypt itself, the two largest Islamist groups, the Brotherhood and the Salafists, won about three-quarters of the ballots in the second round of legislative elections held in December 2011, while the secular and the liberal forces took a battering.

The Brotherhood, an organization founded by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan el Banna back in 1928, has never deviated from its founder’s central axiom:

“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

It is this radical vision, which animates all those in the region who seek a fully Islamic society and way of life.

The Muslim Brotherhood has always been deeply anti-Western, viscerally hostile to Israel and openly anti-Semitic — points usually downplayed in Western commentary on the “Arab Spring.”

First of all, do you remember the justifications for going to war over Libya, which also aint working out that great? We were told that “Barack Obama’s war in Libya bears the intellectual imprint of Samantha Power.” And what was that “intellectual imprint”? This:

“She began to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.”

I remember once attending a lecture from the great analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga. He told a couple of good jokes. One of them was a chance encounter with a mathematician at a university who worked with a fellow professor who was a solipsist. For the record, solipsism is basically the belief that only your own mind exists, and that basically everyone and everything else around you is a figment of your imagination. Plantinga was fascinated with this, and asked the mathematician what it was like working with someone who literally believed you didn’t exist. And the mathematician said, “It’s okay, I suppose. We tend to take pretty good care of him, because if anything were to ever happen to him, that would be it for the rest of us.”

Philosophers love jokes like that.

Barack Obama is so incredibly narcissistic that you begin to wonder if he’s like that mathematician, and thinks that only he exists, or that only he matters.

If you’re president of China, people around the world who are fighting for freedom don’t really expect you to help. If you’re president of China, you don’t have to put up with annoying off-year congressional elections, and then negotiate your budget with a bunch of gun-and-religion-clinging congressmen and senators. If you’re president of China, you can fund your national public radio to your heart’s content. And if you’re president of China, when you host a conference on bullying in schools, people take you seriously.

Unfortunately for him and us, Barack Obama is president of the United States. That job brings with it certain special responsibilities. It’s a tough job—maybe tougher than being president of China. But Barack Obama ran for president of the United States. Maybe he should start behaving as one.

The people of Japan just survived a massive 8.9 earthquake. Then they managed to live through a gigantic wall of water from a tsunami. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they then found out that they would be trapped in the wreckage of their homes – unable to either leave or be rescued – because of radiation leaks resulting from a nuclear meltdown. And what do these people say? “Poor Barry Obama-san! We are very fortunate indeed that we do not have the difficulties of his life! We have no food, no clothes, no place to sleep and we are sick from radiation; but at least we are not being scrutinized!”

I mean, who cares about everybody else; it’s clearly all about Barry Hussein and the hard time he’s having in the job he told so many lies to get. Wah!

It’s rather obvious that we should all have a serious pity party for this loser. Only he matters, after all.

I’ve got a few suggestions beyond Kristol’s for Barry H. First of all, he could quit. I for one wouldn’t complain, especially if Obama took his fellow incompetent Joe Biden with him and allowed John Boehner to cry at his swearing-in ceremony. Because as much as that man might cry, at least he doesn’t whine.

The second thing I have to point out is that here we’ve got Obama publicly wishing he were the tyrant totalitarian dictator of a communist country. I think the fact that he’s plagued with a democratic republic – which he despises – is finally getting to him. Why can’t he run over his dissenters with tanks like the Chinese leaders can, he apparently wonders. Because, you know, Barry, the reason they don’t scrutinize the Chinese dictator’s words in Tahrir Square is the same reason they didn’t scrutinize the Chinese dictator’s words following the events in another square – Tiananmen Square and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, to be precise.

And I know that you would crave nothing more – you Marxist-fascist tin-plated tyrant – than to be able to “punish your enemies” the way the Chinese presidents do it.

Another thing I would point out is that maybe the reason people aren’t scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words as much as they are yours is because Hu Jintao tells the truth more than you do. Maybe if you told the damn truth just once people would stop finding out that, sure enough, you lied to us again.

One of Obama’s lies was about “unparalleled transparency.” Remember that one? Now the same guy who talked about being the most transparent president in the history of the world is whining about being scrutinized, as if this lying little weasel can’t stand it that someone would have actually taken one of his galling and unmitigated lies seriously. And the end result is – fittingly – stories like this one.

“When I promised you unparalleled transparency, what I meant was how dare you examine what I’m constantly trying to do behind your backs!”

So get your skinny butt out of the White House and go pout to China. Go away mad, but please just go away. Sadly, the Chinese people are far too smart to make the same O.B.A.M.A. (as in, “One Big Ass Mistake, America”) as the American people stupidly made by giving you a job.